1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication networks. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for forwarding packets in a content-centric network.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie viewing to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address) closely associated with a physical object or location. This restrictive addressing scheme is becoming progressively inadequate for meeting the ever-changing network demands.
The current architecture of the Internet revolves around a conversation model, which was created in the 1970s for the ARPAnet to allow geographically distributed users to use a few big, immobile computers. This architecture was designed under the influence of the telephone network, where a telephone number is essentially a program that configures the switches along a path from the source to the destination. Not surprisingly, the designers of the ARPAnet never expected it to evolve into today's ubiquitous, relentlessly growing Internet. People now expect a lot more from the Internet than what the ARPAnet was designed for. Ideally, an Internet user should have access to any content, anywhere, at any time. Such access is difficult to guarantee with the current location/device-binding IP protocol.
In the current technology, forwarding is the process by which a node in a packet-switched network transmits a packet from a source address to a fixed-length destination address. An Internet Protocol (IP) forwarder is typically called a router. The router receives a packet at one of its input ports (i.e., network interface) and uses a lookup engine to find an output port to which the packet should be forwarded based on the packet's destination address. Subsequently, the router sends the packet to the output port, which is usually different from the input port.
Under the current IP-based naming scheme, the identity of a host storing content is often implicit in the name which indicates the corresponding content. For example, a browser can access a human-readable host name in a uniform resource locator (URL) form by contacting the machine that hosts the web page corresponding to the URL. However, this contact requires a Domain Name Server (DNS) to translate the human-readable host name into an IP address (e.g., 209.34.123.178). In current networking devices (such as IP routers and Ethernet switches), there is no way to forward a packet without knowing its destination address.